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Something troubling is unfolding in communities across Rhode Island. As local newsrooms wrestle with a rapidly changing media landscape, something important is endangered — the shared acceptance of basic facts that makes self-government possible.

Over the past few months, our state has experienced a wave of events that tested not only our institutions, but our ability as neighbors to separate fact from rumor — and rumor from deliberate misinformation.

As we approach a period that will see overlapping elections, economic stress and contentious policy debates, these tests will not be the exception. They will be the rule. In times like this, local journalism is not a luxury. It’s a necessity.

When news breaks in the Ocean State, journalists and other trusted community messengers are among our first responders. We count on them to separate fact from fiction, to provide context rather than sow panic and to deliver the kind of information that helps people act wisely — and act together. That work is essential to public safety, to civic participation and to the basic confidence that holds communities together. And it demands action because trust, once lost, is extraordinarily hard to rebuild.

Journalists today are working in an environment defined by shrinking newsrooms, the relentless pace of the news cycle, the spread of online misinformation and deepening public skepticism. Producing accurate, trusted reporting takes time, resources and sustained relationships with communities — and even then, that trust can be undermined in an instant.

That reality demands a response. Which is why the Rhode Island Foundation has made strengthening local news and improving access to information a central part of our core grantmaking strategy.

Our approach focuses on what Rhode Islanders themselves have told us matters most: expanding access to trusted news, closing critical information gaps in rural, multilingual and historically underserved communities; and building the long-term sustainability of local news through collaboration and innovation.

These priorities didn't emerge in a boardroom. They are grounded in focus groups with working journalists, interviews with more than 500 Rhode Islanders, and research conducted by Hart Research — community voice driving strategy, not the other way around.

What did Rhode Islanders tell us? More than 60 percent reported paying close attention to local news. Nearly nine in ten said state and local news are important to them. But at the same time, one in three reported they struggle to find reliable local sources they trust. 

That gap — between the need for credible information and the perception that it is hard to find — is not just a media problem. It undermines our connections to our neighbors and our ability to agree on honest solutions.

Civic health is an ecosystem, not a single issue to be solved in isolation. Voting rights, public meeting processes, civic education, neighborhood trust and local journalism are all connected. When one weakens, the others feel the strain.  When one recovers, the whole grows stronger.

But this is bigger than any one foundation or any one state. The Rhode Island Foundation is part of a growing national effort to demonstrate that community connections can be rebuilt. Through collaborations like the one with the van Beuren Charitable Foundation that brought Press Forward to Rhode Island, we make good on our conviction that people can work together effectively, that local institutions can bridge divides rather than deepen them and that the demise of local news is not inevitable.

At a moment when trust feels fragile and misinformation travels faster than facts, investing in an informed public is an act of genuine faith in civic renewal. It is a statement that truth matters, that community voices matter and that a healthy democracy — in Rhode Island and everywhere else — depends on local journalism.